Imagine a set of electronics as easy to play with as Legos. TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir introduces littleBits, a set of simple, interchangeable blocks that make programming as simple and important a part of creativity as snapping blocks together.

Ayah Bdeir is an engineer and artist, and is the founder of littleBits and karaj, an experimental art, architecture and technology lab in Beirut. 
via TED

< … Read More → "Building blocks that blink, beep and teach"

Billionaire Jeff Bezos announced plans to recover from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at least one of the F-1 engines that carried the Apollo 11 rocket into space.

Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Bezos already has his hands in several extreme undertakings, such as the private spaceflight company Blue Origin.

Bezos reported March 28 on his blog that a team … Read More → "Jeff Bezos plans to recover Apollo 11 rocket engines from ocean floor"

via Kottke

… Read More → "A day in the life of a warehouse robot"

Venice appears to have more nicknames than street names. It’s known as the “Queen of the Adriatic,” the “City of Water,” “City of Masks,” “City of Bridges,” “The Floating City,” and “City of Canals.”

But is Venice destined to become “The Divers’ Paradise” much faster than we thought? New research by U.S. scientists suggests it is sinking more than five times faster than experts in Venice believe.

Saying that the city is sinking is just about as obvious as saying that the wind will always blow … Read More → "Venice is sinking five times faster than previously thought"

Screw those stupid cat videos; Slashdot TV has arrived, and it might actually make you smarter.

While most video aggregators these days lean heavily in favor of the cute, the bizarre, and the clickbait-y, Slashdot TV lives up to the site’s “news for nerds” tagline. On the front page of the new property, we see fascinating car tech, Linux running on a TV, and our good buddy Bre Petis demonstrating his newest Maker Bot 3D printer. Can you imagine … Read More → "YouTube for nerds: Slashdot TV has launched"

Altaeros Energies has announced the first testings of its Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) prototype that resembles a sort of blimp windmill. The test took place at the Loring Commerce Center in Limestone, Maine, USA where the AWT floated 350 feet (107 meters) into the sky and successfully produced power, before coming back to earth in a controlled landing. The turbine was deployed into the air from a towable docking trailer, while demonstrating that it can produce … Read More → "Floating wind turbines to produce low cost renewable energy"

At the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Edison was the most famous inventor in the world. He hoarded useful materials, from rare metals to animal bones, and through careful, methodical testing, he made his new inventions work, and previous inventions work better. Churning out patent after patent, Edison’s particular form of innovation was about the what, and not about the < … Read More → "The Idea Factory: Insights on Creativity from Bell Labs and the Golden Age of Innovation"

We’re used to seeing big arrays of flat solar panels used to generate electricity, but a group of MIT researchers has discovered that a flat panel is not the most efficient way to capture the sun’s energy.

By using lots of smaller panels set at different angles on a tower, they found they can generate from 2 to 20 times as much juice … Read More → "3D solar towers generate up to 20 times more power than flat panels"

Regina Dugan, formerly director of DARPA and now with Google, gave a TEDTalk on failure that just came online. That’s great, but there’s also new video of some of DARPA’s coolest projects (like its hypersonic Mach 20 aircraft) included in the talk and that alone makes watching it worthwhile.
via DVICE

Continue reading

… Read More → "DARPA’s ex-director shows new vids of crazy projects in TEDTalk"

A collision between Earth and an asteroid a few kilometers in diameter would release as much energy as the simultaneous detonation of several million nuclear bombs, and with the impact of an asteroid estimated at around 10 km (6.2 miles) in diameter believed to be responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, numerous strategies have been devised to try and avoid such devastation. The latest idea comes from engineers at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde who suggest that a swarm of laser-wielding satellites could nudge Earth-bound asteroids off their collision course.

While an Armageddon-style … Read More → "Laser-wielding satellite swarm to deflect asteroids"